A presentation took place at the African School of Economics this afternoon, on the theme: “Plant human interactions in changing world”. This academic seminar was presented by Dr. Orou Gaoue, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA).

In his presentation, Dr. Gaoue claimed the most important challenge for policy makers is environmental conservation and sustainability. In his research, he showed how ecological systems and plants respond to perturbation, and how this affects the future interaction of the environment. Additionally, he identified the harvest as the time for plant perturbation and used the Matrix Projection Model to measure the plant population’s response to the harvest. The plant population was split in two groups: unharvested and harvested population. The individual plant’s heterogeneity (overachievers, reproducing and growing better than the average, lack of harvest..etc.) is taken account in the study. The results showed that when the heterogeneity of harvest is increased, the population tends to be at its worst and this can lead to unsustainable policies. The conclusion is that ecological systems respond negatively to perturbation, the plants negative response to perturbation also negatively affects future interaction.